Kerry is toast

It’s all Senator Splunge, all the time this morning. Many think that the Democrats have made a terrible mistake:

Jeff Jacoby in the Boston Globe – “For Bush, it’s a step closer to re-election”:

And so the primary season ends. November is still eight months away, but no matter: The general election campaign is now underway. John Kerry is going to be the Democratic Party's presidential nominee. And that means that President Bush is one step closer to reelection.

Just as they did four years ago with Al Gore, in 1988 with Michael Dukakis, in 1984 with Walter Mondale, and in 1980 with Jimmy Carter, the Democrats are poised to nominate a tedious blister as their standard bearer. In the months ahead, the voters will be harangued and hectored by Kerry, who will lecture them about how Bush has been the worst president in modern times, the Bush economy the most desperate, the Bush foreign policy the most reckless.

As spring and summer give way to fall, it will gradually dawn on many of them that Kerry isn't actually saying anything. What was true of the first President Bush, they will discover, is true of Kerry: He has no "vision thing." He has a sonorous answer to every question, but the more he talks -- and he talks a lot; his default setting is "filibuster" -- the less voters will be able to put their finger on why he wants to be president or whether anything about him is more than an inch deep.

John Ellis: “Next, let's visit the issue of Kerry the brand. No one knows anything about him, other than the fact that he served in Vietnam and represents Massachusetts in the US Senate. His economic plan has already been dismissed by The Washington Post as a fiscal joke. His various stances on the War on Terror are impossible to fathom. He has no coherent views on cultural issues. In other words, he's an empty net. Look for the Bush campaign to start working on its slapshot.”

Dick Morris: “The Democratic Party slit its throat last night, abandoning 12 years of pragmatism to indulge in a nominee who's very unlikely to win.”

American Spectator: “Then there's John Kerry. As I've watched him frantically straddle every issue of consequence, my disdain for Kerry has reached an uncommon intensity.”

William Safire in "Kerry's Unreal Deal": “Apparently Kerry's advisers are worried about a too timely capture of Osama bin Laden, thus: "This war isn't just a manhunt." He anticipates criticism for relying too much on the U.N.: "As president, I will not wait for a green light from abroad when our safety is at stake." And he has a simplistic, Mr. Fixit solution to terror weapons: "I propose to appoint a high-level presidential envoy empowered to bring other nations together to secure and stop the spread of these weapons." That'll solve it.”